City, Tribal Leaders Propose Safe Spaces for Controversial Statues

Efforts to erect and restore two city-owned historical statues—one previously removed from public view in the face of backlash—have brought an unlikely team of city officials, community and tribal leaders together.

In a brief speech Thursday afternoon, Mayor Alan Webber told press that at the May 29 governing body meeting, he and Councilors Carol Romero-Wirth, Michael Garcia and Pilar Faulkner will introduce a resolution to install a statue depicting two Tesuque Pueblo Revolt runners inside the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, and to move the Don Diego de Vargas statue to the New Mexico History Museum through a temporary loan agreement.

Webber tells SFR the new resolution represents “a successful outcome where [the statues] can be restored in a public place that would be safe and shouldn’t be threatened,” adding he felt if they sat in a green or open space, they may run the risk of more vandalism.

The Don Diego de Vargas statue, created by Donna Quastaoff and originally installed in 2007, will be in the museum starting in the summer and spend at maximum four years there, leaders said during the press conference. A specific location in the building has yet to be identified, New Mexico History Museum Executive Director Billy Garrett noted.

Several city, community and tribal leaders spoke of unity during the press conference, and Garcia, often a critic of the mayor, followed suit, telling SFR he decided to cosponsor the resolution because it’s “a critical first step” in restoring the sculptures and “getting the conversation around our history and the trauma our community has faced over centuries and really unifying our community.”

“There’s been so much hurt and anger, and we need to get away from that,” Garcia said. “We need to come together, have these critical discussions and start building toward our future.”

In June 2020, city workers removed the De Vargas statue from Cathedral Park the day after Webber changed his position on the structure, saying he supported the removal of several contested city monuments—the De Vargas statue, the obelisk and the Soldier’s Monument on the Plaza—amid demonstrations in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and after protestors defaced the Carson monument on a separate occasion. Webber says the removal was an effort to protect the statue.

“I was very eager that [the De Vargas statue] not be harmed, and there were threats of damage,” Webber says, noting even prior to his tenure as mayor, the statue had been vandalized. “The whole issue was how we keep monuments safe in a time when they were being attacked and destroyed.”

Following the 2020 removal call, protestors toppled the Plaza obelisk in October 2020 on Indigenous People’s Day. Yet Webber does not anticipate that this time around, he says.

“I think if you put both of them in a safe place, in a place where there’s history, there’s respect,” Webber says. “I think that eliminates that problem.”

More recently, at the tail end of August 2023, vandals damaged the Kit Carson monument—a sandstone obelisk in front of the south entrance of the US courthouse on Federal Place.

The Pueblo Revolt Runners statue, on the other hand, has yet to be installed. The City Council accepted the bronze-colored sculpture made in honor of Catua and Omtua—two pueblo men who set out to notify other tribes about an uprising against Spanish colonizers before they were captured and killed—from Tesuque Pueblo as a gift in May 2018. Then the governing body adopted a resolution that called for the statue to be installed in an outside area between City Hall and the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. But installation plans for the sculpture created by former Pojoaque Pueblo Gov. George Rivera first stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tesuque Pueblo Governor Milton Herrera spoke briefly, noting he was “very happy and very proud that history, I think, is being made.”

“Both of the statues have their own history, and these are the histories that our kids need to learn about in an honest way,” Herrera said. “And for us, my Pueblo, I’m sure, is going to be very happy with the outcome…I think as time goes on, city, state, counties, and the tribal communities, if we collaborate, communicate, we will all make things happen.”